Lego Bricks in LaTeX

Who does not enjoy lego bricks, raise a hand! In this post, I am sharing an elegant and efficient way of plotting bricks under 3d view in TikZ. Briefly speaking, it utilizes canvas transforms to plot facets, and describes boundaries of studs in a simple way with cylindrical coordinates based on the azimuth angle (localizing …

Cylinders in LaTeX the Easy and Correct Way

Drawing cylinders in vector graphic is a common task. It is less trivial as it looks at first glance, due to the challenge of finding a proper projection. In this post, I share a simple and robust recipe using the tikz-3dplot package of LaTeX. As opposed to many examples shared online, this approach automatically identifies …

Automating Accessors and Mutators Tests

In object-oriented programming, there are plenty of accessors and mutators to test. This post demonstrates that this effort can be automated with reflection 🚀. The inspiration came from discussions I had with my students during our software-engineering class: how to increase code coverage without lots of manual effort? 🤔 Roughly speaking, the reflection mechanism allows …